We've had endless troubles with Excel in LabVIEW, especially when trying to do anything very complicated. We also couldn't find a way other than ActiveX/COM to interact with it.
In the end we no longer attempt to save directly to Excel in any new code, and whenever we rev up old code we try to see if there's a way to remove it. Alternate options include:
- Saving data as a CSV or other file, then using standard Excel functionality (macros or the "Get Data -> From file" selection on the Data ribbon)
- Creating a 2D string array that is then changed to a single string delimited by tabs, and copying that string to the clipboard programmatically for pasting into Excel (which would have a special sheet for the data to be pasted into that all other sheets would link to)
- This includes a "re-copy" button in LabVIEW that re-runs the code that populates the clipboard, either from memory or from loading from a file. This is mostly just in case someone accidentally copies something else into the clipboard (and either doesn't have or doesn't know how to use clipboard history)
- LabVIEW saves to a local database, and Excel pulls from that database.
- This is the most robust and reliable method of the options, but also the most work to set up.
